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Macy, I meant to ask you this question a long time ago when you told us about your grey water tank. How do you keep it from getting grungy in there… like if you wash a fresh chicken in your sink, or clean out a goldfish bowl? Do you have to add some bleach or something every so often? And if you do, can you still recycle the grey water into a garden? Thanks!

Teri! Great points! First, I don’t dump any leftover liquids in there if I can avoid it… I dump any leftover milks or broths or whatever out by the compost pile, it makes it so its MOSTLY water going down there. Second, I really don’t cook much with meat, I am not sure how I would handle a long term solution if that wasn’t the case. When I do cook meat I fill up a pot to rinse it off and then dump that water out by the compost too. I imagine it will get grungy in there eventually, I am hoping that by putting the safe soaps down there it cuts the grease and things run through smooth for a while. I think after adding showers to the mix I will make a lot more water than I thought I would so I will send a lot of it down the clean-out and not in the garden… but in the summer I should be able to use it more often and maybe I will have a better solution by then. I should mention too that the water goes through a ‘filter’ of sorts to catch any solids that make it through, the dump out onto a screen that is removable/cleanable and then go through a system that is a series of gravel and then the water gets forced up a pipe and into the catchment cistern to be either used or pumped into the cleanout. The hope being that any greases or grosseness gets caught in the gravel/screen before being stored, though I am sure some will make it through…

Hopefully some of that makes sense. I am planning on using it for a little while then updating on how well it works andd/or what I would/will be doing differently. So far it does seem to be working well.